Bara Jichova is Czech-born filmmaker, photographer and artist. She shoots the majority of her source material herself using a variety of tools: an SLR camera, a film camera, and iPhone. First Jichova prints the resulting images and hand-cuts them, hand paints them; later, she reassembles them to create seamless (albeit powerfully punctured) panoramas. These are disquieting scenes that take on difficult topics -- everything from adultery, to the death of her husband. One might not know, upon immediately seeing the works, what they are 'about,' per se. They are narratives with a twist, composite scenes.

Jichova has been going back and forth between static 2-D collage and film. Her films blur the line between documentary and fiction. In her current documentary film "Adultery," she loosely uses the model of ethnographic and qualitative market research, interviewing subjects of different cultural and sociological backgrounds, gathering an in-depth understanding of human behavior.To communicate the grotesque she often uses stop motion animation techniques. Her use of sound and music creates textures. Jichova has built up a lexicon of images that also includes woodcuts, drawings, diverse things culled from books and magazines: surgical close ups of intestines and animal guts, still lives in domestic settings, architectural elements, food, porn. In her series “1989” she collaged a Czechoslovakian communist newspaper into her abstract paintings.

Jichova likes to point at the insides of us, our minds and bodies. What are we truly made of, what are we secretly thinking of? Our desire is often something we wear on the outside; sometimes it manifests itself as shame, fear, the longing to be understood. In all her work, absurdity, playfulness and humor play an important role.

Bara Jichova studied Fine Arts and Art Restoration in the former Czechoslovakia and worked as an art restorer for several years before moving to the US in 2002. She briefly studied at School of the Museum of Fine Arts. In 2007 she obtained a BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art with the focus on film and multimedia. Later she studied film and theater at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She has been part of several group exhibitions and screenings in the US, Holland, China and Czech Republic. She collaborated with film directors Hal Hartley, Michael Almereyda, composers David Ciery, Josephine Wiggs and artists John Holland, Karl Geary, Amy Jenkins and many others. In 2011 Jichova was a art director of the film “Now, Forager”, directed by Jason Cortlund and Julia Halperin, the film got selected for the New Directors Work at Lincoln Center and was the nominee of the IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards in 2012. In 2012 she edited and produced a feature film about Bauhaus architecture on a Cape Cod, 'BUILT ON NARROW LAND', which was the 2013 selection of Architecture and Design Film Festival in New York City and The Provincetown International Film Festival, 2013. In the fall 2013 she was a part of group show called 'Session One’ in New York gallery POCKET UTOPIA. She currently started on project as a story consultant and film editor of a feature film about death called "INSTRUCTIONS ON PARTING" with a director and artist Amy Jenkins. In march 2014 Jichova will curate an evening of animations in the gallery Pocket Utopia, NYC.